Look Alive 2026.
We are going to make it.
2025 started with some degree of hope. Maybe the emotions are dulled by their distance, since it was a year ago now, but I think it was really a year I came into my own.
If bringing hope into the new year is like shaking off frost, then I am a particularly weak snowdrop this year. I had expected the worst of seasonal depression/January Blues/anxiety and claustrophobia to be gone by now. After all, the worst has passed, hasn’t it? Apparently not, as again I feel put on forced pause while everything rushes on around me.
I think the part I hate most is the disconnect I feel with everything, especially between myself and other people. If you’d told me as a teen that actually, deeply, I love spending time with people, I’d have laughed. It wasn’t that I was a loner, it was just that there were so few people I could really be my unmasked self around. After all, people really hated anyone weird back then, even if that weirdness had a name.
All this is to say, January 2026 has been spent at the lowest low I’ve been at in a long time. I find myself thinking, more often than not, Hey, when does life begin again? When does this all stop feeling so precarious? When does it all start to feel worth something?
I hope it begins here, with a look back at 2025. The ice is still thawing, but the sun is coming back. I know my prose is clumsy, but finished is better than perfect.
Looking back, some key 2025 achievements I remember
A full year of freelancing - Wow! This was something I’d hoped for the year prior. I spent a lot of the new year in 2025 afraid that nothing would pop up, that the well of work would go dry, or that I’d lost my spark. It turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong. I performed, I read, I wrote, I consulted on accessibility, I ran workshops… and none of it went badly! With the 2026 new year, I find the same fears re-emerging like stubborn weeds. I’m trying to pull them out, reminding myself of each achievement as I do.
Queer Writers Circle - Another year, and somehow QWC continues to grow. 2025 brought new faces (most of whom became regular), more feedback and opportunity sharing, but also more silliness and laughs. I see growing confidence in those who attend a lot, even from their first sessions, and what always blows me away is how everyone always opens their arms to new attendees. They’re truly the most welcoming and kind bunch of people, and they forever make me glad I started this group. Some of them are now lifelong friends and collaborators, but all of them are voices I want to see more of. Outside of being some of the nicest people, they’re also some of the most talented, and I feel very grateful that our paths have crossed.
On a personal level, organising and facilitating QWC has really improved my own confidence. Pre-QWC, when performing or speaking I’d go all turtle and shrink into my shell at the slightest bit of attention. Now, things are easier. I can speak up when needed, have performed on my fair few stages, and I also think it’s made me a better facilitator. In 2025, even when burnout lurked or disaster felt imminent, I knew I had QWC and that it’d spark me back with some life.
In 2025, my facilitation fees to run QWC were covered by the Derry City and Strabane District Council’s Individual Artist and Cultural Practitioner Award. I feel super grateful for this, not only for its impact on me, or us, but on the wider queer creative community. I know our attendees bring bits and pieces shared from QWC to any creative work they do all over the country, into spaces our reach may not yet touch, to people (creative or not) who may need it. Not to sound evil, but QWC is taking over, and it’s beautiful.
Derry Poetry Slam Winner? - I’d made a deal with myself in 2024, after I’d been unable to attend the poetry slam that year due to my aunt’s birthday, that 2025 would be the year I would try. I set myself the hardest task possible — go in with literally no expectations and take it as it comes, just try. To my surprise, I won the Derry heat despite extremely talented competition. I made it to the final of the All-Ulster Poetry Slam, and was so blown away by all the talent. In the end, the All-Ireland wasn’t to be, though I was quite vocally relieved as I’d be coming down from Belfast after a few days of work and a trip to Bangor that same day on top of everything else may have broken me. That being said, I was completely shocked that I made it to the All-Ulster final at all. I’m still very unsure how I managed that, but I’m so glad I tried. Everyone there was an absolute delight, so skilled and so kind.
Published non-fiction - This was an aim I made in my post last year. While my deepest love is poetry, I managed to get two pieces of non-fiction published in 2025. The first was about a particularly overwhelming encounter with institutionalised ableism, which grew into a reflection of what a younger version of me who never experienced ableism could have been like. It’s called In the quiet, I saw him and is published in Ulster University’s The Paperclip. The second was actually a commissioned piece, as Visual Arts Ireland reached out to me to ask me to write an access panel about my workshop Dreaming Disability Futures. It appears in their 2025 November-December edition.
Workshops! - I got to facilitate workshops for two of my favourite arts festivals. I held an erasure poetry workshop as part of Outburst Queer Arts Festival, using the dreaded Cass Review as our base text. It was lovely and intimate, while also being home for some biting political commentary and giving an AI generated child a drag makeover. It felt needed and cathartic in ways I didn’t know I needed, and I know other people came out of it feeling similar.
(On a personal note, I want to give a huge shout out to my friend Jaeden. That chicken katsu you took me to get after the workshop was the perfect wind down. I needed it. You are so kind. I think I nearly started crying as soon as I took a bite.)
As a part of Bounce Arts Festival, I was given an opportunity to hold a collective discussion, imagining and freewriting workshop called Dreaming Disability Futures. Drawing on the teachings of the book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, the advocacy of queercrip performance collective Sins Invalid, and the concept of care webs, I lead quite a diverse group through dreaming new visions of care. This was held at Void Art Centre, and I’m very thankful for the team there (especially Cecelia Graham) for not only asking me to facilitate a workshop for them, but also for continuing to support me in whatever shape my work takes. This workshop was discussed more in my piece for Visual Arts Ireland, so I’ll spare you the details.
DnD - 2025 held the finale of my uni friend’s 2 year long Dungeons and Dragons campaign. To say it was a moment of equal celebration and grief is to downplay it. Creatively collaborating in this world with some of my dearest friends was everything to me, and while it’s not the end of ever playing DnD, I still miss the world and my character (Fable) so much. Still, I’m overjoyed to have been part of giving this story such a satisfying ending. I’m still dreaming up a tattoo dedicated to a moment shared in the campaign between myself and Shannon, who is one of my closest friends. I still carry so much of it with me, and I’m happy I always will.
Other stuff - There’s some things I’m forgetting to mention, or intentionally omitting. I could write a whole separate post on attending the John Hewitt International Summer School, or on acting on the committee of Foyle Pride, but I fear that I’d go on too long. That being said, know it’s there and is important to me.
Hopes for 2026
Don’t die
Keep doing things that fulfil me
Eventually see this tide of depression ebb away, if only momentarily
Reconnect with the world
Find new things and people to love
Exercise more
Current loves
Books - I’m currently reading A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon. In 2025, I was devoured whole by You Weren’t Meant To Be Human by Andrew Joseph White.
Audio - Jam Mechanics is slowly becoming my comfort podcast. My music taste is in an odd spot at the moment, with my two most listened to songs of the month being i think I’m gonna leave my phone at home tonight by The Narcissist Cookbook and The Only Living Boy In New York by Simon and Garfunkel.
Watching - I just finished watching the new Traitors UK season with Shannon. It consumed us both, especially the ending. Besides that, I’ve been watching a new shoujo anime called Tamon’s B-Side. I’m enjoying it.
Playing - Is it embarrassing to say Magic the Gathering and Sudoku? Besides that, I play Sky: Children of the Light daily, and I’m slowly working my way through Pokémon Legends Z-A. It’s a ton of fun.
Until the next one, stay safe.